What changed everything was R. v. Morgentaler, the 1988 Supreme Court of Canada decision that struck abortion from the Criminal Code.
The case was the culmination of nearly 20 years of open civil disobedience on the part of Henry Morgentaler, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who in 1969 opened Canada’s first publicly advertised abortion clinic in Montreal as an open challenge to the status quo.
Despite popular belief, R. v. Morgentaler didn’t codify abortion as a constitutional right. The text even said it was a “perfectly valid legislative objective” for Canada to have laws protecting unborn fetuses. The Charter of Right and Freedoms, it read, did indeed authorize “reasonable limits to be put upon the woman’s right having regard to the fact of the developing foetus within her body.”
The result, tabled in 1990, was Bill C-43. Shaped under the oversight of then-justice minister Kim Campbell, observers at the time called it a model of parliamentary compromise. It restricted abortions only to cases where the mother’s health was at risk — although it left open a pretty substantial loophole by including mental health in that category. Self-induced abortions — or abortions performed by anyone other than a licensed physician — would be punishable by two years in jail.
Thirty-one years later, Gold could not have been more prescient. Aside from a few fringe private members’ bills, the House of Commons has run headlong from anything even close to resembling an abortion law.
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